They try to create a _perception_ of a quick answer while adding overhead and distracting people.
Personally I prefer to wait than having multiple flashes of content but I do agree no approach is perfect.
What I truly hate are animated skeleton boxes or element level spinners. Why are you trying to hold my attention on something that's not even loaded yet? We all understand the UI paradigm and implicitly understand network delay, you don't need "comfort animations" to keep me happy. I'd rather use the time to look at any of the other tabs or applications across my screens. Then the flash of content actually means something.
Worse still, applications like microsoft outlook on the web, use the skeleton boxes with comfort animations. What they don't do is pre layout their icons. And different icons will appear in different contexts. I often get the case where I aim for one icon, something will load in, create a new icon, and push my intended target out of the click.
Skeleton loaders are a bad kludge over an initially ignored problem.
The loading state is indistinguishable from the page crashing. Did the JavaScript fail, or is the connection just slow?
> animated skeleton boxes or element level spinners
Good news! Browsers have low motion settings. Any programmer worth their salt will respect this and the skeletons won't be animated.
> Then the flash of content actually means something.
On the contrary, if the content is loaded in multiple parts (in my own application, I split the loading into multiple requests: one is cacheable across multiple pages, one is cheap, one is expensive), you either need to not render anything until everything is loaded (bad: the user can't interact with the parts that loaded first), or the page jumps around as content loads in. Skeletons fix this. UI elements in the middle don't end up being 0px tall and moving the stuff below them around nearly as much. How annoying is it to nearly click on something and the page jumps violently and you mis-click?
It honestly sounds like you just don't like lazy programming. That's very fair. Skeletons done right just mean the page is the correct layout while they're partially loaded. Without that, the content is literally unusable (you can't read it interact with things that are jumping all over the place).
Skeletons lie by making an impression that the data is just about ready. So there's this failure mode where data is NOT ready because of a slow app/network, and I end up staring at a fake. Even worse, sometimes skeletons also break scrolling, so you end up even more frustrated because your controls don't work.
2. You show a spinner, which is functionally equivalent to a spinner
3. You wait until the content is loaded and the page feels completely broken, because nothing is happening until it's loaded.
> sometimes skeletons also break scrolling, so you end up even more frustrated because your controls don't work.
This is just lazy programming. The skeleton should be the minimum height of the content it will be replaced by.
A blank page does not try to keep grabbing my attention.
Skeletons also have a toxic effect on web developers by letting them get sloppier.